Wasteland 2 on Steam

[airboy]

I both admire and hate all of you on this thread.  I bought the game yesterday.  I was planning on holding off unleast until November.  After I purchased I read the entire manual before starting play.  And thought about what many of you were griping about.

You have to think about your chosen skills very carefully at game start.  Much more carefully than most RPGs.  A balanced party is essential, and you can have very few missteps when setting up. 

Next, there is an ammo shortage.  But melee weapons are very powerful.  What I do is pop people with guns, or with devistating hand-to-hand attacks at a distance with the assault rifle or the sniper rifle.  Then when they get close I go almost 100% melee weapons.  This both conserves ammo and encourages foes to run up to you while your party has multiples with saved action points to put a beat-down on.  I have one character that is 100% guns (doctor with a sniper rifle and a pistol) and another character with 100% melee heavy weapons (beating board & grenades).  Everyone else has one firearm and one melee weapon.  In the early levels I'm putting all of the extra points into my weapons skills. 

I'm also striving to avoid random encounters because of the ammo cost.  They usually are not too strong, so a 100% melee weapon beatdown is usually viable when combat must take place.

Last, it is critical to have each party member hold a different ammo type firearm.  There is just enough ammo to go around if you don't shoot when you don't have to coupled with only one person getting shotgun ammo, or sniper ammo, etc.......   

This is the most challenging RPG that I have played in years.  Your initial choices will make or break you.  I could not have set up my party as I did without reading the manual carefully plus reading the general complaints about the game here and elsewhere.

[BanzaiCat]

I remember the original Wasteland being much the same; you had to have a certain skill or two to get through portions of the game. If you did not have them, you were humped halfway through and had to start over again.

[Rayfer]

I remember the original Wasteland being much the same; you had to have a certain skill or two to get through portions of the game. If you did not have them, you were humped halfway through and had to start over again.

I don't have Wasteland 2 nor did I play the first. But I liked the way Fallout 1 and 2 handled skills and their in game use. There was always multiple ways to complete a quest or solve a puzzle, be it science, charisma or brute force. I remember reading you could actually play Fallout 1 to a conclusion without killing anything.

[panzerde]

I didn't manage to successfully end the Rail Nomad feud. It may be that this totally screws me on down the line, but that 100% ok with me. This is an RPG, and I'm enjoying role playing a band of post-apocalypse Rangers immensely. To me the point of the game isn't to successfully complete each quest, but to play out whatever happens to whatever resolution happens. At some point later, when I need a break from endless variations on Barbarossa or Stalingrad or Hue or Jutland, I'll try a different party and make different choices and see how that plays out.

So for me, this is a great old school RPG, at least as good as the original Dragon Age. I agree with BG that there are some mildly bugged quests and a few polish issues. Some of it is hard, maybe even unfair, and I can see where that's not most people's cup of tea. This doesn't have the issues of X-Rebirth though, for example, where the game just didn't work and the role playing system wasn't even logically consistent.

As long as the game stays away from grindy FedEx BS, I'm ok with the Topekans massacring the Atchison's because I haven't figured out a solution. Sometimes stuff like that happens in real life and in good stories, and sometimes that means certain outcomes are closed off. I'm cool with that.

For everyone having ammo issues, now that I can get into the Citadel I'm not having ammo issues really at all. Just be sure to pick up anything that isn't nailed down and sell it, so you can afford to buy lots of shiny bullets and bombs later. I just bought about 200 rounds of 5.56mm as well as armor for several of my team, and didn't have to buy sniper ammo, pistol ammo, or energy cells because I've scavenged plenty.

[Nefaro]

I remember the original Wasteland being much the same; you had to have a certain skill or two to get through portions of the game. If you did not have them, you were humped halfway through and had to start over again.

I don't have Wasteland 2 nor did I play the first. But I liked the way Fallout 1 and 2 handled skills and their in game use. There was always multiple ways to complete a quest or solve a puzzle, be it science, charisma or brute force. I remember reading you could actually play Fallout 1 to a conclusion without killing anything.

Wasteland 2 generally feels like Fallout 1 and 2.  Although this "multiple ways" doesn't seem so prevalent thus far.  If I hadn't taken the proper mix of specific skills and wide variety of weapons right from the start, the game would've been much more difficult up to this point. 

The way Wasteland 2 handles filling in such Skill holes in your party is by having NPCs join your party.  I'm unsure whether there are enough on offer to cover all of the ones I'd think essential early in the game, however.  This just means that the missions don't have many different ways of completing them as was the case in Fallout.  :-\

Despite it not quite being the next coming of Fallout 2, it's still a good game.  You just gotta create a well-balanced party with specific selections.  I suppose it does harken back to the older RPGs of the 80s in this way, although that isn't necessarily one of the better facets of which we have fond memories.

If you're a bit of a completionist in RPGs these days, like me, then you'll want to get used to not opening everything or finishing every mission in Wasteland 2.  You'll enjoy it more if you can say goodbye to some parts, in the hopes that you may experience it in a later play.  It's more enjoyable after coming to terms with that.

[airboy]

If you're a bit of a completionist in RPGs these days, like me, then you'll want to get used to not opening everything or finishing every mission in Wasteland 2.  You'll enjoy it more if you can say goodbye to some parts, in the hopes that you may experience it in a later play.  It's more enjoyable after coming to terms with that.

This is a very asute observation.  Let me elaborate for those who are considering purchase.

You have a agricultural worker who is entrapped by a set of vines.  He is dying as the vines rip him apart.  One member of your party has the following odds to save the guy:
Success: 21%
Critical Failure: 44%

The way Wasteland 2 works, you try something and you either get success (21%), critical failure (44%) or no success and no critical failure (35%).  If you have no success and no critical failure - you can try again.

You might look at this and think that you have about a 1 in 5 chance of success.  But your chances of success are less than this.  If you try again, you are 44% likely to kill the guy on attempt #2.  What we have is a set of conditional joint probabilities with a very high chance of a critical failure.

You get fooled on this because you have a lot of other situations where you have say a 75% chance of success and a 2% chance of critical failure.  You might think again, that you will succeed about 3/4ths of the time.  Nope.  Your success rate is actually far higher.  Here you "win" on round one 75% of the time, get to try over 23% of the time, and only lose 2% of the time.  So you either win, or live to try to pick the lock again 98% of the time.  You keep trying and you are highly likely to open the box and not jam the lock forever.

The way Wasteland 2 uses joint probabilities is really interesting because they explicitly give you the success chance and the critical failure chance.  For those who do not understand probability calculations - this can really mislead you on your chances to succeed in a task.  And most people don't understand statistics or probability theory.

Nefaro is right.  You cannot be a completionist in Wasteland 2.  Wasteland 2 actually tells you this why you are playing (if you understand the math).  Some important quests if you choose "A" then "B" is going to die or be destroyed.  You get this almost right off the bat on the choice between saving Highpool or the Ag Center.  It is reinforced with the realistic pleas for assistance from the group that you did not choose on how they are being ground away unto death because you did not choose to save them.

[JudgeDredd]

Did anyone else not pick up the shovel after the burial of Ace and regret it when they came across all those lumps in the ground that said "Something is buried here" but you had nothing to go for it with? lol

Start again me thinks now I understand a bit more about the abilities (Brute Force, Melee values)

[panzerde]

Did anyone else not pick up the shovel after the burial of Ace and regret it when they came across all those lumps in the ground that said "Something is buried here" but you had nothing to go for it with? lol

Start again me thinks now I understand a bit more about the abilities (Brute Force, Melee values)

Not that you might not still want to build a different team anyway, but you can find shovels laying around in other places, or even buy one from the vendor in front of the Citadel, I think. It was a vendor I encountered early, anyway.

[JudgeDredd]

You had no money at the start.

In ALL my travels I never noticed a shovel. I could've missed it though.

I have started again and picked the shovel up and already found some kit in 3 lumps of earth even before leaving the Citadel.

[airboy]

You had no money at the start.

In ALL my travels I never noticed a shovel. I could've missed it though.

I have started again and picked the shovel up and already found some kit in 3 lumps of earth even before leaving the Citadel.

Hit the "z" key frequently.  It highlights everything that you can interact with in range of eyesight.  Makes the game much, much more enjoyable and eliminates the pixel hunt.  That way you don't miss shovels, toasters, etc.....

[Kushan]

New patch has been released.

http://wastelandrpg.tumblr.com/post/98474203546/wasteland-2-patch-1-56458-release-notes

[Tpek]

I love the sporadic cultural references strewn throughout the game (like in the Fallout series).
For an example there's a companion named Lexicanum, when you ask him about his name he says
he's heard it means Encyclopedia in the 41st millennium (a Warhammer 41K reference). :D

[JudgeDredd]

If I'm honest, I think I'm missing half the game or more...because either I'm bored and just don't want to read the text, or I read it but with my short term memory problem, it's gone...doesn't sink in.

Which I guess makes the "story" kind of non-existent...almost

[Nefaro]

I love the sporadic cultural references strewn throughout the game (like in the Fallout series).
For an example there's a companion named Lexicanum, when you ask him about his name he says
he's heard it means Encyclopedia in the 41st millennium (a Warhammer 41K reference). :D

Yeah, I've read quite a few of them.  The latest was the Red Ryder 'air gun' reference in the museum that stuck out because it was so long.  But there are many short ones.

[Bletchley_Geek]

I love the sporadic cultural references strewn throughout the game (like in the Fallout series).
For an example there's a companion named Lexicanum, when you ask him about his name he says
he's heard it means Encyclopedia in the 41st millennium (a Warhammer 41K reference). :D

Yeah, I've read quite a few of them.  The latest was the Red Ryder 'air gun' reference in the museum that stuck out because it was so long.  But there are many short ones.

I spent last night a good 20 minutes playing Snake in the Ranger's Museum - that's one you can make as long or as short as you want.